revived them with their own body warmth.
"When Don Rodrigo had recovered," the
chief read from another plaque, "he called on
the shogun to thank him for the 'kindness of
the Japanese people. Don Rodrigo spent a
year in Japan, then sailed for Mexico in a ship
built by an Englishman. He took with him
23 Japanese merchants. This was the first
time a Japanese mission crossed the Pacific
to open trade with Europeans."
Factory Jobs Tempt Women of the Sea
That afternoon I sat in the headquarters of
the fisheries cooperative drinking tea with a
robust ama of 48. Two gold teeth flashed
when she smiled.
"I started to dive when I was 16," Hatsue
said, "and I've done it ever since. Our season
is short, from the middle of May until about
the 10th of September; the rest of the time
I pack sardines in the cannery. Most of us
don't live beyond 60; I suppose it's the cold
water and the hard breathing.
"Many of our daughters don't stay in the
village. They go to Tokyo to work for the big
companies like Sony and Matsushita, so they
can have weekends off and buy the things
they see on television. Some people say ama
won't last another generation. I don't know;
we still have 20 young girls in our village, so
we can keep going for a while."
Although the ama lose some of their daugh
ters to industry, they are still far from a relict
population. By recent count, there are as
many as 7,000 women divers in Japan.
The largest concentration of ama in Japan
lives on the Shima Peninsula, south of Na
goya. Most of these live in and around Wagu.
The ama of Wagu dive from an island close
inshore called O-shima. I dived with them in
the wash and suck of the tide among the
rocks, close to the rusting wreck of a coaster
that ran aground the year before.
At lunchtime, one ama told me, "Last year
two of those ships with crates on decks"-she
meant container ships-"collided, and one
broke apart and sank. Her cargo leaked out;
it was sulphuric acid. It must have rolled
along the sea bottom; one girl got burned."
Nowhere are the ama woven more closely
into the fabric of Japanese history than at
Kuzaki, a small hamlet of weathered wooden
houses huddled on a rockbound promontory
not far from Wagu. In Kuzaki I examined
ancient manuscripts that Ohta-san, the fish
eries head, kept in his safe. The oldest, dated
A.D. 1111, contained a request from Ise Shrine,
the St. Peter's of Japan, for noshi awabi, strips
of dried abalone.
"In Nihon Shoki, an ancient work telling
us of the Yamato clan, founders of our line of
emperors," said Ohta-san, "we read that in
the year 5 B.C. the sun goddess, Amaterasu
Omikami, ordered the Princess Yamato-hime,
daughter of the eleventh emperor, to found
her house of worship at Ise. Her words were:
'The province of Ise... is a secluded and
pleasant land. In this land I wish to dwell.'
"In 3 B.C., Yamato-hime went down to the
sea and came to this place. Here she saw
women diving into the sea. They offered her
awabi, and the princess found it delicious.
She commanded them to make regular offer
ings of awabi to Ise Shrine.
"Our people have held to that ever since."
Next day, September 14, the last day of the
season, I watched 260 ama make a concerted
assault on the awabi off Yoroizaki headland,
the precise spot where Yamato-hime first saw
the ama nearly 2,000 years ago.
I stood at the foot of a white lighthouse
where the cliff dropped nearly sheer some 60
feet to the water. A horn signaled the start;
round the point raced a flotilla of nearly a
hundred boats. At the same time from the
rocks below a multitude of white-clad women
waded into the sea.
Within moments the dark sea was stippled
with white, the heads of the swimming ama,
and over the swash of the surf rose a sighing,
plaintive chorus, the elegy of the ama's
exhalations. The thin piping sounded against
the whispering of the sea, repeated endlessly
until it seemed that the sea itself was weeping.
Fifty minutes later, a flag fluttered from
the chief's boat, and within five minutes the
sea was empty.
Goddess Guards Her Diving Daughters
At dusk I returned to the headland. Above
me the light turned slowly and flashed its
warning over the darkening sea. The wind
was dying, and I could hear only the subdued
growl of the surf. At the edge I looked down.
On a ledge ten yards below stood a wooden
figure of Yamato-hime, holding an abalone in
her upturned palms and looking out to sea.
Beside her, the flickering flame of a paper
lantern painted a warm orange smudge on
the smoky blue of the darkened sea.
From the headland where she first looked
down on them, Yamato-hime still keeps
watch over her daughters, the sea nymphs
of Japan.
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